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When the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi was growing up, her grandmother, Leman Ypi, would tell her that during her honeymoon—which took place in Italy in 1941, when war raged throughout Europe and at the edges of the Pacific—she was “the happiest person alive.” Decades later, Ypi wondered how Leman, “no fascist apologist,” had managed to experience joy amid so much devastation—not just in the midst of war but also years later, when her family was persecuted in Albania during the reign of the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. “Indignity,” Ypi’s latest book, is devoted to the question of how her grandmother weathered her tumultuous life—a capability that, Ypi learns, was deeply tied to a sense of dignity. Not long ago, Ypi sent us some thoughts on a few books about dignity that have played a part in her exploration of the topic. Her remarks have been lightly edited.

Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

This book is one of my favorites for a combination of personal and philosophical reasons. I was brought up in Albania by my grandmother, who was born in Salonica (as Thessaloniki was known when it was part of the Ottoman Empire) to an élite Ottoman family, but suffered a lot in Communist Albania as a single mother and the wife of a political prisoner. She lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, fascism, Nazism, communism and the post-communist years, and yet always insisted that even though she lost so much—wealth, status, connections—she never lost her dignity. Dignity, she would say, is connected to our capacity to do the right thing, to a moral dimension of freedom.

Kant’s “Groundwork” helped explain this intuition to me. In the book, Kant reflects on the source of moral duties and suggests that what is distinctive about humans, compared with other species, is our capacity to take a critical distance from our immediate passions and inclinations. We can reflect on how these things affect others, and how they contribute to a purposeful life in which other people are not treated as mere means to an end, but as beings with inner worth. It is a view that connects dignity to moral will, and that explains how people can find resources to resist even when enduring extreme hardship.

Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man

by Friedrich Schiller

Nowadays, the idea of human dignity serves as the core of many international legal and political documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet it has a paradoxical character that I find fascinating. On the one hand, it’s absolutely inviolable. On the other hand, it’s grounded in legal and political documents that are meant to protect it—and often fail miserably.

This apparent tension, both the inviolability of dignity and its fragility, is at the heart of the thinking of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose “Letters” confront the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This text was written in the late eighteenth century, but it resonates strongly with the present. One reason for this is that it asks what can give hope at a time of conflict, injustice, and political disillusionment. Schiller contends that hope can come in the form of the redeeming power of art—in art’s capacity to mediate between feelings and moral imperatives, and in a kind of aesthetic education that reflects our moral vocation.

The Radetzky March

by Joseph Roth

When I first read “The Radetzky March,” which was published in 1932, I was immediately struck by the way that Roth captures the fragility of a whole social world. The book, which follows one family, the Trottas, across three generations, takes place in the Habsburg Empire—a world that is held together by rituals and assumptions that are very different from those that structure the world in which we live today.

In the Trottas’ era, the dominant conception of dignity was connected to rank and status. The book shows how, as the political order changed, so, too, did the meaning of dignity. While writing about my grandmother’s life, I found myself thinking often of the parallels between her world and that of Roth’s masterpiece. I dwelled on the way that he depicts—with humor and sadness—the fortunes of a family shaped by the shifting meaning of identity and its connection to dignity. For the Trottas, identity wasn’t tied to a single country but rather bound up with the imperial order, and with their duty to this larger system of the Empire. But then, as the Empire disintegrates, so do their senses of self have to change.

Oblomov

by Ivan Goncharov

One of the most devastating objections to the Kantian conception of dignity is the idea that morality isn’t grounded in reason or freedom but in power relations—that moral norms are just the product of domination, dressed up as universal law.

I’ve always found that a very hard proposition to argue against, except perhaps by pointing out its consequences: that if you take it seriously, you’re left with a kind of moral nihilism that makes any motivation to act pointless. This, in turn, makes the objection against Kantianism weaker—after all, most of us get up in the morning, feed our children, read the news, go to work, look after elderly parents, and so on.

Goncharov’s brilliant novel “Oblomov,” which was published in 1859, examines what it is like to lead a nihilistic life consistently. The first section is about how the title character does not want to get out of bed. It’s both tragic and comic; Goncharov doesn’t judge Oblomov. He just lets the reader live inside his stasis, showing them what it means to lead a life without moral commitment—not out of evil or ill will but because one has lost the basic faith in humanity that underpins action itself. The novel really demonstrates the way in which, without that kind of faith, everything, from love to the most mundane act, is impossible. Everything, including suicide.

The night before the political activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar was murdered, in the spring of 2023, he made an urgent call from his home in Vancouver to a friend in New York. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and fellow-activist, picked up around midnight. Nijjar had phoned to deliver a warning: there was “chattering going on” among acquaintances of his who frequented night clubs in downtown Vancouver. A group of men had recently begun to show up at the clubs, looking for “a high and some weapons”—and inquiring about Nijjar and Pannun. “He said that I needed to be careful, that I was in danger,” Pannun recalled.

The next day, June 18th, Nijjar made his way to the outskirts of Vancouver to visit the gurdwara where he worshipped. A plumber by trade, he’d been the temple’s president for four years, and had spent much of that time advocating for the creation of a homeland for Sikhs, called Khalistan, in an area of northern India that includes the state of Punjab. The separatist movement, which has inspired generations of activists, has long infuriated the country’s leadership. When Nijjar left the temple that evening, he was in a good mood. It was Father’s Day, and his son Balraj had given him a pair of jeans. They’d planned a special meal: pizza and seviyan, a sweet pudding that was Nijjar’s favorite dessert. From the parking lot, Nijjar called his family. “Get dinner ready,” he said. “I’m coming home.” As he drove his truck toward the exit, however, a white sedan pulled up, blocking his way. Two hooded men approached on foot, drew handguns, and fired some fifty rounds into the driver’s-side door—shattering the glass, puncturing the metal, and piercing Nijjar’s arm, chest, and head. He died instantly.

Canadian law enforcement suspected that the killing was the result of a plot orchestrated by the Indian government, whose history of violence against Sikh separatists stretches back four decades. For months, Canadian officials had been meeting regularly with Nijjar, warning him about potential threats to his life. U.S. intelligence agencies, too, had been monitoring the situation. And yet, just a few days after Nijjar’s death, Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, was fêted by President Joe Biden, in a ceremony on the White House lawn. Some seven thousand people were in attendance, chanting Modi’s name. “The world order is taking a new shape,” he announced.

About a week later, the Czech police, acting on U.S. intelligence, arrested a fifty-one-year-old Indian national named Nikhil Gupta, in the Prague airport. Gupta, the Department of Justice later claimed, had a history of international narcotics and weapons trafficking, and was involved not just in Nijjar’s murder but also in “an alleged plot, directed by an employee of the Indian government, to target and assassinate a U.S. citizen for his support of the Sikh separatist movement.” The citizen was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the friend Nijjar had phoned before his death.

Gupta has pleaded not guilty, and his case is currently in pre-trial hearings in the Southern District of New York. The evidence that has been released thus far suggests an Indian-backed, transnational campaign of espionage and violence aimed at a handful of American and Canadian citizens. Authorities have begun to outline a spy network behind Nijjar’s killing that includes Gupta and his handler, Vikash Yadav—a former officer in India’s intelligence agency, known as the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW. (Yadav has been linked to Lawrence Bishnoi, a legendary Indian mob boss, who reportedly controls an international network of more than seven hundred loyal foot soldiers.) The plot against Pannun was foiled by a U.S.-based sting team involving a government informant and a D.E.A. agent who had introduced themselves to Gupta as, respectively, a Colombian cocaine supplier and a hit man. Gupta had paid the fake hit man fifteen thousand dollars in cash, the first installment of what was ultimately intended to be a fee of a hundred thousand dollars. Court documents detail a phone call in which Gupta promises to provide the informant with planeloads of “production” (narcotics) and “toys” (weapons). They also note a seven-second video of Nijjar’s dead body, slumped in his truck, that had been circulated as proof of the assassination.

In October, 2024, after negotiations with the U.S., Modi’s government agreed to break ties with Yadav, who is currently at large and wanted by the F.B.I. India, which has never acknowledged culpability for the killing, has portrayed Yadav as an independent actor, but a source close to Indian intelligence told me that one RAW officer privately characterized these denials as “total bullshit.” Another called the plot “a botched operation.” Court filings for Gupta’s trial indicate U.S. prosecutors will argue that India was directly involved in the attempt to assassinate Pannun, and that he was just one of several targets in a scheme to murder political activists in Canada, California, and New York. These individuals, fearing for their lives in India, had immigrated to North America decades ago and continued advocating for an independent Sikh state.

A few minutes after Nijjar was shot, his son Balraj received a distress call from a family friend and raced to the gurdwara, sprinting through a crowd that had already grown to some two hundred people. “They were pulling at my clothes, my arms, as I ran,” he told me. In the center of the throng, already cordoned off with police tape, was Nijjar’s bloodstained pickup. “The second I saw it, I knew he had passed,” Balraj told me. “His last breath was for Khalistan, regardless of how many thousands of miles he was from home.”

The idea of a Sikh homeland arose nearly a century ago, as colonial Britain lost its grip on its South Asian territories. The region began to split along religious lines, and Sikh leaders, recognizing that their community was much smaller than those of Muslims and Hindus, advocated for their own sovereign state. The idea never came to fruition. In 1947, British India was partitioned into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. As a vast migration flowed from place to place, depraved and indiscriminate faith-based violence ensued, affecting Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike. The province of Punjab, where most of the Sikhs in British India lived, was split in two.

Sikhs currently constitute less than two per cent of India’s population. Since Partition, however, advocacy for an independent state has grown, funded in part by wealthy members of the diaspora and fuelled by a pattern of discrimination by the Indian government. The most striking instance came in 1984, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her own bodyguards, who were Sikh; the ruling Indian National Congress helped to organize a retaliatory spasm of mob violence that killed thousands of Sikhs. In the aftermath, the state began to disappear members of the community. Such brutality has only encouraged resistance. Although Sikhism is built around tenets of oneness and divine love, a small group of militants have carried out a long campaign of violence. Before September 11, 2001, Sikh separatists held a bleak record for the deadliest act of aviation terrorism in history: in 1985, all three hundred and twenty-nine people on board Air India Flight 182, a passenger flight from Toronto to Delhi, were killed when a bomb in the cargo hold brought the plane down off the coast of Ireland.

The cycle of violence and discrimination has only heightened since Modi came to power, in 2014. As the leader of the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party, he has spearheaded a ruthless Hindu-nationalist campaign that villainizes and assaults religious minorities. For a party that believes Hindus have a preëminent right to rule India, the Sikh separatist cause is a profound affront—especially when the calls for independence are made from Canada and the U.S. According to the source close to Indian intelligence, senior RAW officials hold a “skewed world view” that “everything is a conspiracy, that the West is out to get India,” and this paranoia played a large part in the recent assassination plots.

The Indian government regards Pannun’s law offices as a hotbed of terror, a base from which he directs “Punjab based gangsters and youth” to undermine the “sovereignty, integrity, and security” of India. The offices are situated in a large corporate center, decorated with garish contemporary sculptures and softly flowing water features, in East Elmhurst, Queens. The interior suggests the detritus of a small business in stasis: Post-it notes stuck to walls, piles of paper stacked haphazardly, a mini-fridge filled with forgotten lunches.

On a recent visit, I was led in through a series of back hallways and patted down by two hulking guards. The main entrance stays locked, the lights in the waiting room off. Pannun, who met with me in a small conference room, was dressed soberly. “Since 2023, I’ve only worn black,” he said. “I’m only going to change that once we liberate Punjab.” He grew up in a village outside the city of Amritsar, the home of Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple. In 1984, Indian military forces invaded the gurdwara to capture Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a Sikh militant who was hiding inside. In the raid, known as Operation Blue Star, the army opened fire on Bhindranwale’s followers and civilians alike. Government documents put the death toll at a few hundred individuals, but independent reports suggest the figure exceeds four thousand. (It was this unilateral attack, sanctioned by Gandhi, that led to her assassination.) Pannun was seventeen at the time. “We could see the helicopters bombing, the shooting,” he said. “There was blood everywhere.” Fearing that the slaughter would touch off an insurrection, the government organized a campaign called Operation Woodrose, in which thousands of young Sikhs living in rural areas were detained and interrogated. “They were people I grew up with,” Pannun said. “I haven’t seen them since.” One young man he knew was tortured so viciously that his back was broken.

At the time, Pannun was too young to be radicalized by the violence. “If I’d been older,” he told me, “I would have been advised that the right way to take on the Indian government is to pick up an AK-47.” It was only after a few years of college that he began to reflect on the Sikhs’ prospects for self-determination. “When did we have a chance?” he said. “When did we have a government to champion our own narrative?” Nowadays, he focusses on advocating for a separate Sikh state, in part through promoting a referendum in which residents of Punjab can vote on the issue. The probability of that happening is slim. In the state’s most recent legislative election, in 2022, the sole Sikh-nationalist party won just two per cent of the vote. To build awareness for the cause, Pannun helps coördinate activists back in India, whom he encourages to engage in various forms of dissent. One common action, he told me, is to “find a government building, find an Indian flag, and write ‘Khalistan Zindabad’ ”—Long Live Khalistan.

India has designated Pannun as a terrorist, an accusation that he dismisses. “If you’re defending your own faith, then everybody is a terrorist,” he said. Still, he sometimes indulges in martial rhetoric. “I’m ready to face a bullet,” he told me. “My stake is my life, and my stake is what I’m going to do for the people who died fighting for my rights.” Though he speaks of himself as a martyr-in-waiting, the fact of the matter is that the young activists in Pannun’s network in Punjab take on most of the risk. Defacing flags and government buildings inevitably enrages local officials, and his workers, many of whom are paid recruits from poor rural areas—some as young as fifteen years old—have faced brutal retribution. Though Pannun denies encouraging any non-peaceful activism, he seems to view violence as a natural response to a state that brutalizes and oppresses Sikh nationalists.

After Nijjar’s murder and the assassination plot against Pannun, members of the Sikh diaspora who once felt emboldened to voice separatist sympathies now fear retaliation. Arjun Singh Sethi, an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law who specializes in racial and religious profiling, told me, “You’ve got people who lost family members in the ’84 pogroms and the decade of enforced disappearances that followed. Some sought refuge in the United States and Canada. They found peace. They want to express their First Amendment constitutional rights, but they’re afraid of going to the gurdwara. They’re hesitant to go to a protest. They’re afraid that, if they show up, their family could be harmed in India.” Others worry that polarizing figures like Pannun will further endanger the Sikh community by antagonizing the Indian government. I spoke to several Sikh Americans who voiced disapproval of Pannun, his goal of a referendum, and the Khalistan project as a whole.

In September, 2023, three months after Nijjar’s murder, Justin Trudeau, then Canada’s Prime Minister, publicly accused the Indian government of involvement in it. The fallout between the two countries was swift—India suspended visas for all Canadian citizens, and both nations expelled the top-ranked diplomats from the other’s embassy. The response from the Biden Administration, following Gupta’s arrest, struck a very different tone. Though the U.S. possessed considerable evidence that the Indian government was likely involved in the plot on Pannun’s life, it chose to accept their version of events, namely that Yadav was a rogue officer acting on his own.

Dan Stanton, who served more than three decades in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, believes that the disparity in responses can be explained in part by the significant role that Sikhs play in Canadian politics. “We’ve had Sikh Cabinet ministers, Defense Ministers, M.P.s—all of which annoys the Modi government greatly,” he told me. “It was very easy for the U.S., on the other hand, to just move forward.” Representative Judy Chu, of California, who founded the bipartisan American Sikh Congressional Caucus, told me, “There is not much sensitivity to the Sikh community” in Washington.

In the past decade or so, the U.S. has viewed India as an important regional ally and bulwark against China, and this might also account for some of the Biden Administration’s reticence to confront Modi publicly. President Trump’s posture toward India has been harder to parse. This summer, he hit the country with a fifty-per-cent tariff—one of the highest imposed on any nation in the world—yet suggested last week that he would roll it back. A handful of scholars, including Sethi, argue that a guilty verdict for Gupta might provide the President with a negotiating chip to use in future dealings. Stanton is less certain. “It’s just par for the course with Donald Trump,” he said. “He’s a President who doesn’t read intelligence, doesn’t listen to intelligence, and deals with India whenever it comes up based on whatever mood he’s in. I think the furthest thing on his mind is transnational repression in the United States.”

Just a few days after Trump imposed tariffs on India, Modi made a diplomatic trip to meet with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping. The visit was widely seen as a breach of trust, but Trump quickly dismissed the idea that there would be any repercussions. “I’ll always be friends with Modi—he’s great,” he said. “I just don’t like what he’s doing at this particular moment.” ♦

We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out for a loved one’s holiday enjoyment: pocket-size artificial-intelligence gizmos (Rabbit r1, $199), in-home hologram machines (Code 27 Character Livehouse, $558), human-size robot servants (1X NEO, $20,000). The components of tech have become better and cheaper, from microchips to speakers and screens (have you seen how cheap a good TV is these days?), enabling out-there innovation. On the consumer side, we are bored of rote device designs; we’ve seen a dozen models of iPhone and crave something refreshingly different. Hence the proliferation of gadgets with nonsensical names, promising the same horsepower as major-brand equivalents but with new hardware twists and laughably low prices. We live in the age of the Swype ($18), a “rechargeable disposable” vape with an integrated touch screen on which one can check the weather and get notifications via Bluetooth, mingling nicotine and dopamine hits. Who doesn’t want to find that in the bottom of their stocking? The apps and devices collected here fulfill that old promise of technology: making your life better, or at least more interesting, even if just by encouraging you to log off.

Have More Fun

Enuosuma mini projector 

$49.99

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This past summer, some friends and I rented a house on Fire Island that was bohemian enough to have no television. But there was a toddler in our group who wanted screen time, and the rest of us needed the option to turn our brains off after a long day in the sun. So I bought this mini projector ($50) on Amazon. It’s from a brand called Enuosuma, but that doesn’t matter; there are dozens of alternatives, and they’re all effectively the same. It turned out to be ideal for both Ms Rachel on YouTube and “Michael Clayton” on Apple TV, the picture bright and crisp, with enough adjustability to work on wonky walls. You don’t even have to feed a source into the projector; it connects to Wi-Fi and runs its own apps onboard. What a world!

Nintendo Switch 2 

$449

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You could also use the projector to play a new profusion of portable video games. Nintendo’s recently released Switch 2 ($450) became a hit on top of a hit after the original Switch pioneered the concept that a console can be mobile. The new model upgrades the screen, memory, power, and battery life, and the inaugural games are takes on the classics: Donkey Kong Bananza ($70), Mario Kart World ($80), and Pokémon Legends: Z-A ($70). Nintendo’s not just for kids, but the harder-core gamer might enjoy an updated Steam Deck ($400) for playing PC games on the go. If you don’t know what kinds of games your giftee likes, just buy something like the RetroSnap Play ($70) or the Anbernic RG 40XXV ($53), two in a sketchy range of gadgets that emulate thousands of classic games at once. All of these machines will need power, and batteries have also improved of late. The comparatively tiny Anker Prime Power Bank ($80) will decrease charging anxiety for the whole family.

Healthier Handhelds

BOOX Palma 2 Pro 

$399.99

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Of course, video games aren’t the healthiest forms of content, and who needs more screen time? E-ink is easier on the eyes, not to mention on the brain. The technology has evolved since the first Kindle—no more shuddering screen refreshes. The Daylight DC-1 ($729) is a high-powered, smooth, full-touch-screen computer with its own e-ink-like display and access to apps including Spotify, Slack, and Notion. It’s designed to break tech addictions, and it can be used in bright sunlight, so you can read on a park bench if you want to. The BOOX Palma has consolidated its status as the go-to pocket-size e-ink screen; its latest iteration, the Palma 2 Pro ($400), has full color (think newsprint-level saturation) and runs the Android 15 operating system to replace most of the functions of your smartphone. Even Kindle has a color version now, the Colorsoft ($250), which is ideal for fans of comics and graphic novels. Bibliophiles may still prize print, but there’s something about carrying dozens of books at once, and enjoying a self-illuminating reading experience, that tends to convert even the most committed Luddites.

Anti-Technology Technology

Fujifilm digital camera 

$849

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Still, you might need stronger stuff, or just a passive-aggressive gift for the person in your life who is a little too obsessed with their screen. Nothing says “I would love to have more uninterrupted face-to-face conversations with you” like a gadget that makes someone’s phone less interesting. Brick ($60) is a plastic module containing an app that blocks selected other apps when it comes into contact with a smartphone. Stick it to the fridge and tap it with your phone before and after work, or for the duration of a dog walk or a date; then tap it again to reënable your device. Opal (free, or $100 annually for a “pro” version) does the same thing using only an app; the downside is that it’s easier to disable. I can testify to Opal’s utility: with its help, my screen time and social media use are way down, on weekdays, at least.

Another solution is to supplant your phone’s native features with better ones. The camera app Halide ($60) can remove all of an iPhone’s image processing, A.I., and otherwise, so that your camera produces satisfyingly film-like, more natural-looking digital photographs; it has encouraged me to be more intentional about the snapshots I take on my phone. The Fujifilm X Half digital camera ($845) mimics shooting with a film camera and has a fittingly vintage-style body. If you throw a copy of the tech critic Cory Doctorow’s recent book “Enshittification” ($28) in with the gift, your recipient may read it and become so disgusted with the value extraction that Silicon Valley performs on its users that they will lay off the phone on their own.

Adventures in Streaming

Giving someone a subscription to a new streaming service is a little like buying them a membership to an art museum: it’s a hint that their cultural-consumption habits could stand a little improvement. But don’t think of it as issuing criticism; think of it as lending a passport to adventure. Netflix has become the boring big-box store of video content. As an alternative, give the gift of the Manhattan indie movie theatre Metrograph’s streaming platform ($5 per month), for highly curated art films; or the BBC’s BritBox ($11 per month), for fans of endless bucolic detective dramas; or Crunchyroll ($8 per month), for niche anime. If your loved one is sick of Spotify or has started getting a little too into A.I.-generated music spam, change their lives with Idagio ($10 per month), a classical-music streaming service, or Nugs ($15 per month), a platform for live performances from rock and jam bands.

Avant-Garde Gadgets

Ozlo Sleepbuds 

$299

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There’s no Christmas tradition like unwrapping a technological gift and then spending the rest of the day wrestling to get the thing working. The experience is all the more memorable when the intended function of the device in question is slightly strange or questionable. A startup called Ozlo makes Sleepbuds ($274) (originally designed at Bose), in-ear headphones that are slim enough not to feel uncomfortable when you sleep on your side, perfect for those who can’t stop consuming content even when they’re unconscious. For those who like to stand out and get stares on public transportation, try a folding-screen smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 ($1,600).

Meta Ray-Ban glasses 

$379

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If your giftee is a fan of both artificial intelligence and blanket digital surveillance (the two go together, really), the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses ($800) have a six-hundred-by-six-hundred-pixel screen integrated into the lenses, a wrist band for reading gesture commands, and a pair of speakers, so that your Meta chatbot can talk back to you. If you’re wearing those, you may as well lean in all the way and buy a straight-up graphics-processing unit, such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 ($2,000, if you can find one), recommended for running A.I. models at home. Friend ($129) is an A.I.-chatbot companion contained in a circular pendant, worn around the neck, that listens to everything happening around you, then texts you about it. Early reviews suggest that the companion is quite mean—perhaps consider buying a Friend for your frenemy. ♦

On a Friday morning last month, Professor Sir Paul Collier sat watching the proceedings of a community meeting at a sports club in Scunthorpe, a steel town in North Lincolnshire. Collier was dressed exactly like the renowned development economist that he is: comfortable hiking boots, checked shirt, beige slacks, tweed jacket, white beard. For decades, Collier immersed himself in the question of what makes poor countries grow, or fail to grow, mostly in Africa. He ran the research group at the World Bank and wrote papers on foreign aid, civil wars, and corruption. In 2007, his work found a global audience with “The Bottom Billion,” an analysis of why the world’s poorest economies were diverging from, rather than catching up with, more prosperous ones. In the past decade, however, for a combination of personal and political reasons, Collier’s attention has returned to England—particularly its struggling, post-industrial communities, like the one where he grew up. Last year, he published “Left Behind,” which he summarized to me as “a diagnosis of the same bloody problem for poor places in rich countries as for poor countries.”

Collier, who is seventy-six, is more shambling than imposing. But when he speaks, and especially when he writes, he is forceful and impatient, like someone who fears that his ideas are running out of time. “Divergence breeds despair—and despair breeds anger,” he writes, in “Left Behind.” By his own admission, Collier’s mind operates at a certain altitude: he thinks in terms of demographics and decades, as opposed to news cycles. In 2015, he was criticized for using the word “indigenous” to describe Britain’s white population, in the context of immigration. Collier often says that the ultra-rational “homo economicus” of traditional economics does not exist. But he can sometimes sound like one.

Collier was in Scunthorpe to attend a meeting of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, a coalition of local volunteers that formed two and a half years ago to, in the group’s words, “change the narrative about what is possible” in the town. Scunthorpe typically makes the news in connection to some crisis at the steelworks. (This spring, the British government took control of the plant, after its Chinese owners threatened to shut it down.) The town fits the profile of other places that Collier identifies as “spiralling down.” In June, the government named Scunthorpe one of Britain’s seventy-five most left-behind communities, owing to a combination of poverty, poor health, and low productivity. Scunthorpe Tomorrow had invited residents to a series of workshops to discuss how to spend a new twenty-million-pound grant from the state that is intended to fix these problems.

Each table in the club bar had a large piece of paper, on which participants were invited to describe their visions for Scunthorpe and its present situation. Sample comments: “No one wants to own the problems”; “nowhere for the kids to go”; “self-deprecation of the area.” In one corner of the room, an artist named Rebecca Ellis was working on a mural, to illustrate more positive ideas. Ellis had painted the words “Youth Clubs” in large crimson letters, along with a futuristic bus and a street-food zone. The steelworks, a two-thousand-acre site dominating Scunthorpe’s eastern side, was depicted as a windowless brick box.

Collier joined in at a table that included a local vicar. He has to be careful not to say too much. “You’ve got to have a modest role, you know,” he told me. “I’ve not got all the answers, but I can suggest things.” In the nineties, after the Rwandan genocide, Collier helped advise the government on how to rebuild its economy. His experiences in Rwanda—along with his analyses of post-independence Tanzania and Singapore, and of Deng Xiaoping’s China—can give Collier’s prescriptions a bracing edge. In “Left Behind,” he doesn’t argue that autocracy can be more effective than democracy in raising people’s living standards in post-conflict situations, but he doesn’t argue the opposite, either. “Critics need to find other leadership teams in comparable situations which did better,” he writes. “They won’t find them in Burundi.”

Collier calls himself a centrist, but his politics are of the left. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the philosopher Michael Sandel’s idea of “contributive justice”—that everyone in a society, including the weak, must have agency in order to contribute to and define the common good. But a lifetime of development studies has also made Collier skeptical of clever bureaucrats and virtuous intentions. He urges self-sacrifice by leaders and experimentation in the face of complex problems. Collier tries to offer what he calls credible hope, but he acknowledges that this can be hard to come by. One of the co-founders of Scunthorpe Tomorrow is Robert Allen, a former civil servant at the Treasury, who grew up caring for his disabled father in the town. “We’re starting to realize that, as Paul would sort of put it, no one’s going to come and save us,” Allen told me.

Scunthorpe’s town crest includes a heraldic emblem of a “Blast-Furnace issuant therefrom Flames all proper.” In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s four blast furnaces, each named after a Queen of England, were the centerpiece of the British steel industry, which was the second largest in Europe, after West Germany’s. Scunthorpe was advanced and aspirational—an industrial garden town—with wide roads, good jobs, and plenty of parks.

But the past forty years have been extremely cruel. Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms triggered an economic shock from which the town has yet to recover. The steelworks remains in operation, but employs a quarter of the people it once did. The rest of the town, which sits on a ridge, not far from the North Sea, has a health problem, a crime problem, and a skills problem. It even has a name problem. In the early days of the internet, a “Scunthorpe problem” occurred when a word, like “Scunthorpe,” contained another word, like “cunt,” that meant it got blocked by profanity filters. I have reported from Scunthorpe a number of times in the past ten years, and it is a place longing for its stages of grief to end. The website of Heslam Park, where the community meeting was held, displays its support for the three clubs that use its facilities: the rugby club, the cricket club, and Tackling It Together, an initiative that aims to reduce male suicide in the town.

Each table at the meeting suggested ideas for how to spend the money on offer from the national government to improve Scunthorpe. Most of the proposals were sensible but small-scale: clearing rubbish, improving the parks, reimagining the libraries. Then it was Collier’s turn to speak. He took the microphone and stood, slightly stooped, in the middle of the room. He is not a fluent orator, but he has a gruff magnetism. He praised the energy of the discussion. “That’s your future,” Collier said. “It’s your own energy, right?”

He was doubtful about the ostensible purpose of the discussion: how to distribute the twenty million pounds of national funding. Scunthorpe has a population of eighty thousand people. The money would be paid over ten years. Collier pointed out that this amounted to one cup of coffee a month per adult resident—at Scunthorpe, rather than London, prices. “That’s not going to transform anybody’s life,” Collier said. “But you thinking about ‘What can we do together?’ That will transform.” He ignored the residents’ suggestions and urged them to think more ambitiously, about the kind of work that might keep young people in the town. “There are jobs here,” Collier said. “But they’re crap jobs, warehouse jobs in Amazon, that sort of rubbish.” Quiet, stunned laughter filled the room. “You need jobs that are interesting, worth doing. Where are those interesting, worthwhile jobs in the future going to come from? Well, we don’t know.”

Part of Collier’s role in places like Scunthorpe is to say the unsayable. “He will challenge in, like, really blunt terms,” Allen told me. “And that’s really, really valuable, because we’re all really close to it.” Collier’s idea for what to do with the government money was to start clearing disused parts of the steelworks, in order to make way for a new business park for local entrepreneurs. “Instead of drinking one cup of coffee extra a month for the next ten years, clear that site,” Collier said. “And make it work with your own brilliant talent.” Collier’s boldness was informed, at least in part, by necessity. “You can see the forces,” he confided later. “The steel company’s going to close. The Treasury has got no money to fund it for very long.”

After Collier spoke, the meeting took on a looser feel. Jonathan Frary, another Scunthorpe Tomorrow volunteer, stood up to close the session. Frary is a former triathlete who runs Curly’s Athletes, a sporting-events business in the town. He spent seven years in London, working in H.R., before returning to Scunthorpe. It was difficult to talk about his home town when he lived away from it. “Most people just said, ‘I bet you are glad to be out,’ ” Frary said. “You kind of carry that with you.”

When Collier visits Scunthorpe, Frary likes to give him a lift in his truck and collar him for big-picture conversations about A.I. and the evolution of humanity. He says that the economist’s message is always the same: “You can’t rely on what you already know.” In the bar at Heslam Park, Frary channelled Collier as he exhorted the residents. “Make a start. Doesn’t have to be right. Doesn’t have to be a project,” he said. “It’s a journey. Just do something and find other people that are passionate about doing it. So, go do shit.”

Collier grew up in Sheffield, a steel city in South Yorkshire, about an hour west of Scunthorpe, after the Second World War. His parents, who ran a butcher’s shop, left school when they were twelve. Collier won a place at a grammar school and then at Oxford. He never really looked back. Between 1970, when Collier was twenty-one, and last year, employment in the British steel industry shrank by ninety per cent. People in Sheffield and South Yorkshire suffered just as badly as those in Scunthorpe, if not worse. The Colliers were not immune. “My family back in Sheffield is bimodal,” he said. “Two of us have been really successful, and quite a few who are just total disasters.”

Two of Collier’s young relatives from Sheffield—the grandchildren of his first cousin—were taken away from their parents. In 2008, Collier and his wife, Pauline, who had a young son of their own at the time, became the children’s guardians and brought them to live in Oxford. “We took them when they were nearly two and nearly three,” Collier recalled. “By which time they were already totally emotionally traumatized.”

Collier was deeply engaged with international poverty research at the time. He had returned to teaching, from the World Bank.“The Bottom Billion” had been published the previous year. It struck him that his African friends and colleagues thought that it was perfectly natural for him to take care of his less fortunate relatives, whereas the British response—expressed in undue bureaucracy and raised eyebrows—made him feel eccentric. “It was excruciating, shaming . . . forty pages of questionnaires. ‘Do you unplug your electric plugs every night?’ ” he told an interviewer, in 2018. “At no stage did anybody actually ask whether we were decent human beings who would love these little children.”

Bringing up the children, as well as his own son, made Collier reflect on the fate of his wider family and home city. Sheffield now has some of the poorest neighborhoods in the U.K. After the Brexit vote, Collier decided to study the country’s regional inequality directly. In his book “The Future of Capitalism,” published in 2018, he reflected on three growing divides: within Britain’s borders; between those with higher and lower levels of education; and globally, between the richest and poorest countries on earth. “My own life has straddled each of the three grim rifts that have opened in our societies,” he writes. “While I have maintained a cool head, they have seared my heart.”

Britain’s imbalanced economy is one of its greatest sores. When the country was still in the E.U., its seven poorest regions were poorer than anywhere in France, Germany, or Ireland. The size of the economy of Yorkshire and the Humber, of which Scunthorpe and Sheffield are both part, has more in common with Lithuania than with London. When Allen, of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, first saw the capital, in his late teens, he felt as if he was visiting a different country. “I feel that more keenly now, twenty years on, than I did as a nineteen-year-old,” he said. In 2021, Collier started advising northern towns and cities—starting with Sheffield—on how they might begin to turn their fortunes around.

Boris Johnson was Prime Minister at the time. A policy called Levelling Up was one of Johnson’s favorites, a mission “to end the geographical inequality which is such a striking feature of the U.K.,” as his government called it. Levelling Up had its own government department. (Collier was hired briefly as an adviser). But like most Johnsonian notions—building a bridge to Ireland, or an airport on an island in the Thames—Levelling Up turned out to be more of a talking point than a serious investment program. Johnson’s unflamboyant eventual successor, Rishi Sunak, cancelled the northern leg ofHS2, a multibillion-pound high-speed railway network that was supposed to knit the country together.

Collier was briefly optimistic that the new Labour government would take the challenge more seriously. “Keir Starmer has done enough to be given the benefit of the doubt,” he wrote, last summer. But, like many people, Collier has been baffled by Labour’s incompetence and sense of drift. For years, Collier’s basic critique of the British state has been that it is far too centralized, politically and culturally, in London, and that the Treasury, which controls government spending, has a narrow and reductive approach to how it views investment.

None of that has changed. Except that Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who represents a constituency in Leeds, are now much less popular than when they won office. “They realize they’re failing,” Collier said. Last December, Labour announced reforms to local government that will abolish and merge hundreds of smaller councils into larger, more powerful units—a plan that Collier thinks will make matters even worse. “If you diagnose that we’re failing because we don’t have enough control, we need to have more centralization,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”

Collier insists that his work is nonideological. But that doesn’t mean it is not political. Six months ago, Lincolnshire elected its first regional mayor, from Nigel Farage’s nationalist Reform U.K. Party. Scunthorpe itself—which has a Labour M.P. but voted overwhelmingly for Brexit—will be a target for Reform at the next election. “Consider two futures: one where all the places like Scunthorpe—working-class—all around England fail,” Collier told me. “Politically, what’s going to happen? Well, we know what will happen. The place will explode. It will explode into despair and anger, and we know where both of those lead.” Allen told me that he saw the previous decade of voting in the town as a series of increasingly desperate choices. “I think it’s really hard to predict with certainty how the next few years are going to play out,” he said.

After the roundtable with residents, the volunteers in Scunthorpe withdrew to a smaller room at the sports club to discuss their progress. A representative from the University Campus of North Lincolnshire, which opened in the town in 2019, suggested an A.I. tool to match students with local mentors and career opportunities. Frary, the former triathlete, offered to host Scunthorpe’s first Soup—a community event where entrepreneurs pitched small-scale business ideas—inspired by regeneration efforts in Detroit. Collier interjected now and then, to emphasize the importance, and the value, of vocational trades, like bricklaying.

Afterward, we took a tour of the university campus. Collier was impressed by the equipment in a robotics laboratory and the fact that there was barely anybody in the building at three o’clock in the afternoon. “It’s like a neutron bomb has hit it,” he muttered. Back in Oxford, the following week, Collier acknowledged both the immense difficulty of reviving places like Scunthorpe and the absolute necessity of doing so. “If it has to work, and you’re not confident that it will, what do you do?” he asked. “You start, and you learn as you go.” A copy of the Spanish edition of “Left Behind” was on the table between us. Collier quoted Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, who is credited with saving the euro during the depths of the financial crisis. “Whatever it takes,” Collier said. “It’s that attitude that is exactly right: whatever it takes to make provincial England work again.” He liked the phrase, so he said it again, this time as a slogan: “Make Provincial England Work Again.” ♦

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself as the historian of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of living in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably one of the few men in American letters who defined the taste of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the lights on, or, even better, anoint them. The sad young literary men and women he plucked from the crowd were thus invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.

Determining what the nation did and did not read was the through line of Cowley’s career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to produce reviews at The New Republic, many—including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Muriel Rukeyser—would go on to have storied careers. By midlife, Cowley was esteemed as an editor and essayist, a nimble translator of contemporary French literature, and a creative-writing instructor at Stanford. He was also a canny industry operator—a man who knew how to play the different parts of the publishing machine against one another in the interests of work he wanted to promote. His most cited act of heroism may have been his effort to revitalize the career of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity after the Second World War, by publishing an influential edition of his work while at Viking Press, but he also kept fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his close friend Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived magazine that Cowley helped edit, published Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)

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In a 1963 issue of Esquire, a tart article called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” found Cowley to be near “The Hot Center” of power. Gerald Howard’s new biography, “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Penguin Press), zooms in on Cowley’s place at that center, tracing his involvement with “just about everything and everybody of literary consequence” during what we now call the American century. Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one. Cowley’s life story demonstrates not just how reputations are built (and destroyed) but also how “one determined actor” managed to bend an entire canon “to his tastes and convictions.”

When Cowley was born, at the end of the nineteenth century, American literature was widely considered a sideshow act. Mark Twain may have been one of the century’s most famous men, but the prevailing sentiment was nevertheless to deem his country’s literature “provincial, backward, lacking in artistic polish or value,” Howard writes. Anxiety surrounding the nation’s cultural marginality was widespread. Surveying the last century or two of American literary output, one saw a fragmented corpus that reflected a nation more easily understood region by region than as a whole.

In April, 1917, in the middle of his undergraduate studies, at Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to volunteer in the war effort, following in the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver on the front, he was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but he witnessed the carnage a mortar shell could inflict. His time in France ended in the fall, and he was back in the states by November. When he landed in New York, he decided to continue his “long forlough”—away from school and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this point on, he would be closely attached to the cultural life of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, he returned briefly to Harvard, obtaining his degree the next year.) Some of the most entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this intense period, when Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the most direct path to influence was freelance book reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and when he wasn’t panhandling for review assignments from editors or pawning review copies (and, in one dire instance, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he would occasionally work as an extra in an O’Neill play. By his early twenties, his byline regularly appeared in well-regarded publications, and while much of this work was humdrum, according to Howard, one gets a sense from the writers he engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust among them—of Cowley as someone caught between the magic of European modernism and the earthier American tradition.

From the beginning of his public life as an intellectual, Cowley would be preoccupied with questions about, as he put it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguish one cohort from another, and how one might unite the disparate strands of American literature into an identifiable movement. These concerns would come to the fore in an essay he published in 1921, at twenty-three, shortly after he won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in France, where many of his peers had moved to escape a souring national mood and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.

“This Youngest Generation,” which appeared in the New York Evening Post, contains observations that Cowley would refine for the rest of his life. It crystallized what Howard calls his “most persuasive insight”: “that the American writers who were coming of age in the postwar years, particularly those who’d chosen to expatriate themselves to Europe, constituted a literary group distinct from the generations that had come before.” Cowley knew that the Great War’s shadow was inescapable, and while this insight was hardly original (as Virginia Woolf wrote, more famously, “on or about December 1910 human nature changed”), he was uniquely sensitive to the ways in which that shadow impressed itself on the writing of his contemporaries. The essay was not rosy or complimentary; he knew that his peers had not written anything of note—yet. But what made the Americans in Europe distinct from their forebears, he argued, was that they wrote of the American experience as a global condition. Their misspent years on the Left Bank, or in the trenches of the French countryside, revealed to them their home’s entanglement with the affairs of the world. They invited, more than others before them, an exchange of ideas with the Continent, and also desired to reinvent American writing along these lines.

In 1934, Cowley would expand his essay’s ideas in his best and most meaningful book, “Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s,” which documents how his cohort forged a literature in the crucible of national disaffection, war, and exile. It’s a remarkable and unusual work—alternating between first and second person, its account is at once intimate and general. The book’s sociological rendering draws heavily on personal material, like Cowley’s memories of hanging out in cafés and bars in Montparnasse and the Village, or watching Hart Crane drunkenly compose poetry, or procuring stamps for an ashen James Joyce. Cowley presents as a Joe Schmo who has miraculously appeared at the right place at the right time. But it also has a definite thesis: Cowley’s contemporaries were the “first real” generation in “the history of American letters,” because its members “belonged to a period of transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created”—one that reflected their “common adventures,” and a “common attitude” of longing and alienation from parochial, middle-class life (and art) in America. He saw the writers among whom he dwelled as creating a “new literature” modelled after French influences, such as Flaubert, while “extending in different combinations through the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane.” The Lost Generation looked back at “a tradition that had been broken for a time,” and reëstablished it, by fusing modern influences from Europe.

“Exile’s Return” ’s more riveting passages feature Cowley writing, with a refreshing frankness, on the giants in his midst, and also the Dada rabble-rousers he befriended in Paris. The early European modernists had built monuments to their mastery of the novel, but these works were flawed by their limited appeal for readers who couldn’t untangle their webs of references or submit to their works’ overwhelming need for attention. Joyce possessed an “intolerable genius”; Proust, in writing “In Search of Lost Time,” had “turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry.” What the young Americans offered was writing that, unlike these forebears, could better reflect the feeling of living in the present, and could also, by avoiding the seductive but stultifying impulse to turn art-making intensely inward, be legible to those outside what Cowley called “the religion of art.”

“Exile’s Return” appeared in the fifth year of the Depression, a time when Cowley’s circle was becoming increasingly radicalized. Many had joined the Communist Party or were, like him, fellow-travellers who felt it was their duty to join hands with the working class. As Cowley proclaimed in a letter to the poet Allen Tate, “The conception of the class struggle is one that renders the world intelligible and tragic . . . a world possible to write about once more in the grand manner.” He threw himself into political activity, lending his name to open letters and visiting some of the fronts of class conflict, from miners’ strikes in Kentucky to the streets of Barcelona in the middle of the Civil War. But he was not the most adept political observer, and his star would briefly implode when he picked the wrong side of the debate that would tear apart the left, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin. Among other things, Cowley wrote a piece for the New Republic about the Moscow show trials that, according to Kazin, “condemned” the defendants. A letter he received from Edmund Wilson, his predecessor at The New Republic, in 1938 best sums up how many felt about Cowley by the end of the decade: “What in God’s name has happened to you?”

By the start of the Second World War, it was possible that politics would truly ruin Cowley’s life: he was hounded in the press, lost many friends and jobs, and was even targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Cowley was left, for a time, immiserated, resorting to hunting squirrels on the grounds of his house, in Sherman, Connecticut, to feed his family.

But then he began inching his way back up to the highest precincts of American letters. His first lifeline was an assignment to profile the editor Maxwell Perkins, for this magazine, in 1944. Perkins was responsible for helping to introduce Cowley’s compatriots (most famously, Fitzgerald) to the American public. In a way, he was the blueprint for what Cowley would become in the following years, when he disavowed formal politics and fully committed himself to a no-less-ideological enterprise: the promotion of modern American writing.

In 1944, in a deus-ex-machina-like turn, Cowley was awarded a five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, money that allowed him to chart a new course. Until then, as a magazine editor and a freelance writer, he had been chained to the hamster wheel of the publishing calendar. With no deadlines, he was able to reinvent himself as a literary historian. He began working as a talent scout and a consulting editor at Viking, which invited him to help edit their “Portable” books—an influential paperback series of introductory collections of major authors’ works. Like many domestic industries, publishing was flush with resources, shored up by the wartime economy. In every G.I.’s rucksack, nestled between rations, were novels.

Cowley’s tenure at Viking produced what is arguably the most lastingly consequential of his editorial efforts: collecting and reprinting a number of Faulkner’s most significant pieces of writing, and, in the process, creating a more complete picture of his corpus for historians and academics to debate. His success was by no means predictable. After the war, Faulkner was an unlikely candidate for canonization. His books were out of print. While he was never an obscure writer, he was not roundly celebrated, either. Maxwell Perkins himself had told Cowley, “Faulkner is finished.”

Across Howard’s biography, a routine plays itself out: Cowley decides that a figure, whether it is a forgotten writer or an unproven one, deserves more attention, and he mobilizes. Viking rebuffed Cowley’s idea at first, but then he got to writing, placing two essays about Faulkner in important magazines. It was enough to convince the publisher that “a flurry of highly positive critical activity” was unfolding. The project was green-lighted. In “The Portable Faulkner,” Cowley proffers an interpretation which would become the standard, one that elevated Faulkner from a Southern-gothic writer into a key player in American modernism. Less than a decade after the collection appeared, Faulkner would receive a Nobel Prize, and he would say, “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay.”

The impression produced by Howard’s biography is of Cowley as a Zelig-like character present at every important moment in American literary life. Yet for a man who so intimately understood how to build a reputation, his own standing suffered greatly in the years after his death, in 1989. His politics are certainly one reason. And, though the political currents that all but sank him have evolved, they have not done so in ways conducive to a Cowley revival. In 2014, shortly after the publication of his letters, the volume’s editor, the scholar Hans Bak, speculated that Cowley’s obscurity might owe to the so-called canon wars of the nineties, in which academics tussled over the diversity of college syllabi, which skewed toward the dusty tradition of “Great Books.” Cowley, Bak said, “had constructed a canon of American literature dominated by white male writers . . . an entire image of the story of American literature which has sort of been subverted.”

The writer Susan Cheever, who knew Cowley through her father, John—whom Cowley picked out of the slush pile—thinks that Cowley was forgotten simply because most editors are. They aren’t the stars, after all. Editors may be invoked in acknowledgement pages or awards speeches, but they don’t much inhabit the public imagination of literary life.

Still, not all editors have—or are able to take on—the task Cowley gave himself: to believe so earnestly and powerfully in the work of his peers that he spent his life making sure they would not be forgotten. That his work can be boiled down into a reading list traversed without enthusiasm by most high-school seniors is hardly his fault. If anything, “Exile’s Return” is a book that belongs on those lists, too. That book is a skeleton key that unlocks a sense of how much work was required in order for a generation to agitate for their own writing. If Cowley stood for anything, it was the idea that a national literature could not exist without the toil of true believers who committed themselves, regardless of the caprices of sales or critical reception, to bettering their countrymen through good books. ♦